Anson Caralya
First Post
Psionics OD&D to AD&D
In this vein of OD&D and AD&D and balance: I was flipping through the OD&D books over the holidays, and noticed something for the first time: Eldritch Wizardry introduced psionics, with a structure similar to that found later in the AD&D PHB and DMG, but with one significant difference: psionic ability carried a cost. Fighters lost one point of strength for every 4 psionic abilities, magic-users lost spell levels for every psionic ability, etc. If Gary were active on the boards now I'd ask him why he dropped the cost, why not keep some type of check on the added powers? Since psionics were pure upside for PC's in AD&D, and only even remotely likely for PC's with extremely high ability scores, in our old AD&D games any proposed character with psionics got laughed out of the room as a blatant attempt at power-gaming (not the term we used at that time -- "greedy jerk" was probably more likely).
In this vein of OD&D and AD&D and balance: I was flipping through the OD&D books over the holidays, and noticed something for the first time: Eldritch Wizardry introduced psionics, with a structure similar to that found later in the AD&D PHB and DMG, but with one significant difference: psionic ability carried a cost. Fighters lost one point of strength for every 4 psionic abilities, magic-users lost spell levels for every psionic ability, etc. If Gary were active on the boards now I'd ask him why he dropped the cost, why not keep some type of check on the added powers? Since psionics were pure upside for PC's in AD&D, and only even remotely likely for PC's with extremely high ability scores, in our old AD&D games any proposed character with psionics got laughed out of the room as a blatant attempt at power-gaming (not the term we used at that time -- "greedy jerk" was probably more likely).
